BOOKS
161
read books, played golf, gone to weddings, whose legs were good, who had
weathered storms, a fine woman whom no one now wanted." But it is diffi–
cult to feel much of anything for her, in spite of all the facts we've been told,
simply because
to
know someone is a very different matter from knowing
information
about
them. Since Mrs. Chandler never comes to life, it's hard to
care about her lover's decision to leave her.
A similar problem plagues 'Twenty Minutes." Again the protagonist is
a lonely middle-aged woman who this time is isolated from humanity as a
result of a gruesome horseback-riding accident. While she vainly waits for
help, she recalls a series of sexual and romantic disappointments. Once more
I felt the disconcerting sensation of trying to care about a clearly imperiled
character I hardly knew (the accident happens in the beginning of the story.)
Unfortunately, after her string of banal memories she still seemed more like
a symbol than a human being. Perhaps that is the point, and Salter is trying to
create an Everywoman. Still , I prefer his stories where the characters have
strong individual presences and he is more realistic and less impressionistic.
In "Foreign Shores," he writes masterfully about a woman's jealousy of
her live-in childsitter, Truus, who has a close relationship with her son. The
tory is complex, told fi-om different points of view, and is thoroughly in–
volving. It's an example of the riveting fiction that occurs intermittently in this
rollecrion.
Ethan Canin, the twenty-seven year-old winner of a Houghton Mifflin
Literary Fellowship, offers many of the pleasures of the traditional story in
his debut collection,
Emperor oj the Air.
The prose is well-crafted, often
charming and energetic. There is a fairly distinct sense of a beginning, middle,
and end to these stories, and the majority of them have satisrying resolutions.
These stories also have a definite sense of setting and a balanced view of
society. Indeed, Canin avoids most of the pitfalls of the young writer, though
not all of them. He writes perhaps once too often from the point of view of
an old man who sounds suspiciously like his characters who are in their
twenties. Also, there's a formulaic quality to many of these stories. Typically,
his protagonist is an appealingly normal person who suddenly starts
exhibiting "strange behavior" such as Jodi in "Where We Are ow," who
insists on visiting available homes with her husband and a real estate agent,
when she has no intention or means of buying one. The eccentric behavior is
a symptom, of course, which Canin uses to explore a conflict. However,
these conflicts are often resolved too neatly, as if to illustrate a maxim. Thus
the husband/narrator who prides himself on honesty decides
to
play along
with Jodi's dishonest behavior and lies to the real estate agent himself be–
cause love is stronger than honesty or a man's convictions. Thus the old high–
school astronomy teacher in the title story realizes that love is worth more
